Not Fade Away.(Kristin Scott Thomas)

Byline: editor: Valerie Steiker

Kristin Scott Thomas, starring in The Seagull, tells Adam Green about playing--and being--a woman of a certain age .

In the 1994 romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral, Kristin Scott Thomas established herself as a paragon of cool, reserved English beauty. She became a star two years later in The English Patient by turning up the heat to reveal the passion simmering beneath the surface. Now, making her Broadway debut in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, a smash two seasons ago at London's Royal Court Theatre, she sends up flares, shoots off fireworks, and launches rockets in a blazing performance that redefines her as a superb stage actress. As it happens, she is also playing a grande dame of the theater, Madame Arkadina, a colossally vain and selfish actress of a certain age who wreaks destruction on everyone caught in her orbit. "I just love her--she's such a nightmare," Scott Thomas says. "She's me. She's every actress. Her fear of never working again, her fear of not having any money, and her fear of not being loved anymore are certainly things I recognize in myself. And her fear of getting older makes her a ...